in association with

Britt Music & Arts Festival

Education & Engagement presents

Third Coast Percussion

“Points of Contact”

Music at SOU April 5, 2016 ▪ 7:30 p.m. SOU Music Recital Hall

UPCOMING CONCERTS AT THE OREGON CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT SOUTHERN OREGON UNIVERSITY

Friday, April 8 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 9 at 3:00 p.m.

Doric String Quartet presented by Chamber Music Concerts

Friday, April 15 at 7:30 p.m.

Tutunov Piano Series presents Joanna Tzeciak

Saturday, April 16 at 7:30 p.m.

Adam Lion Senior Percussion Recital

Sunday, April 17 at 3:00 p.m. Michael Crafts Senior Recital

Monday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m.

Jayce Gao Dongyue Graduate Saxophone Recital

Friday, April 22 at 7:30 p.m.

Alexander Schimpf presented by the Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra

Saturday, April 23 at 7:30 p.m.

Katie Harman Ebner Graduate Vocal Recital

Sunday, April 24 at 3:00 p.m.

Eli Toombs Senior Recital

Monday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m.

Daniel Chavez Senior Saxophone Recital

Wednesday, April 27 at 7:30 p.m. Zachary Yuyang Junior Saxophone Recital

Thursday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m.

Jared Brown and Kevin Younker Graduate Percussion Recital

Friday, April 29 at 7:30 p.m.

Matt Haimovitz and Christopher O’Riley presented by Chamber Music Concerts

Saturday, April 30 at 7:30 p.m.

Jordan Curcuruto Graduate Percussion Recital

Friday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m.

Tutunov Piano Series presents Eugene Skovorodnikov

Saturday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, May 8 at 3:00 p.m. Siskiyou Singers

Tuesday, May 17 at 7:30 p.m.

Music for Saxophone and Piano, Otis Murphy and Haruko Murphy

For more info and tickets: 541-552-6348 and oca.sou.edu

PROGRAM Fractalia (2011) Owen Clayton Condon (b. 1978) Table Music (1987) Thierry De Mey (b. 1956) Resounding Earth, Mvt II. Prayer (2012) Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964) Trying (2014) David Skidmore (b. 1982)

INTERMISSION Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) Steve Reich (b. 1936) Twilight (2001) Tobias Broström (b. 1978) Shi (2008) Alexandre Lunsqui (b. 1969) Third Construction (1941) John Cage (1912-1992)

Ars longa vita brevis

PROGRAM NOTES

Former Third Coast Percussion member Owen Clayton Condon writes music influenced by minimalism, electronica and taiko drumming. Condon has been commissioned to write music for the 75th anniversary celebration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater,” and the video and light installation “Luminous Field” at Anish Kapoor’s iconic public sculpture “Cloud Gate” in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Fractalia, written for Third Coast Percussion, is a sonic celebration of fractals, geometric shapes whose parts are each a reduced-size copy of the whole (derived from the Latin fractus, meaning “broken”). The kaleidoscopic fractured melodies within Fractalia are created by passing a repeated figure through four players in different registers of the marimba.

Musique de Tables clearly displays Belgian composer and filmmaker Thierry De Mey’s interest in merging the visual and audio aspects of music into a performance art that engages multiple senses. Musique de Tables is scored for 3 amplified “table urfaces” to be constructed by the performers and notated in a manner entirely unique to this composition. Every sound made by the performers is inseparable from a specific physical motion, and De Mey instructs the performers to create sounds/motions with such colorful names as “castanets,” “the stone,” “wind-shield wipers,” and “the fan.” This unique work of chamber music/choreography has become standard reper-toire for percussion ensembles and other new music groups.

Grammy-award winner Augusta Read Thomas was Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony from 1997-2006. Her piece Astral Can-ticle was one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Thomas was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2009, she has been on the American Music Center Board since 2000, and she is the 16th ever University Professor (of five current University Professors) at The University of Chicago.

Resounding Earth is scored for four percussionists playing bells (and bell-like instruments) from a wide variety of cultures and historical periods. The piece was conceived as a cultural statement celebrating interdependence and commonality across all cultures; and as a musical statement celebrating the extraordinary beauty and diversity of expression inherent in bell sounds.

Bells can be used to celebrate grand occasions, hold sacrificial rites, keep a record of events, give the correct time, celebrate births and weddings, mark funerals, caution a community, enhance any number of religious ceremonies, and are even hung around the necks of animals.

About Resounding Earth, Thomas says:

“Bells are central to my music; bells permeate my music. For over 25 years, in every work for orchestra, and in many for smaller ensembles, I have been composing music frequently using percussion consisting of bell sounds (pitched metal percussion and all the mallet percussion instruments) many of which have their origins in other than Western musical cultures. As such, this new piece is an extreme extension of work I have been doing for decades.”

Resounding Earth was commissioned by The University of Notre Dame's DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, with additional funding from The Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Department of Music, and the

2013. They have the honor of being the first ensemble at the University of Notre Dame to create a permanent and progressive ensemble residency pro-gram at the center. Third Coast Percussion performs multiple recitals annually as part of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Presenting Series, engages with the local community, and leads interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with a wide range of disciplines across campus.

Third Coast’s recent and upcoming concerts and residencies include De Doelen (Rotterdam), National Forum of Music (Wroclaw), Metropolitan Muse-um of Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Town Hall Seattle, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival (CO), Eastman Kilbourn Recital Series (NY), St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Liquid Music Series (MN), National Gallery of Art (DC), Ensemble Music Society of Indianapolis, the Mondavi Center (CA), Uni-versity of Chicago Presents, and more. Third Coast has introduced percussion to chamber music audiences in Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois, securing invitations to return to many of these series.

Third Coast’s passion for community outreach includes a wide range of residency offerings while on tour, in addition to long-term community engage-ment residencies at home in Chicago. In addition to its national performances, Third Coast Percussion’s hometown presence includes an annual Chicago se-ries, with four to five concerts in locations around the city. The ensemble has collaborated in performance with a wide range of artists and performing en-sembles including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Eighth Blackbird, Glenn Kotche, and video artists Luftwerk.

The members of Third Coast Percussion— Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore— hold degrees in music performance from Northwestern University, the Yale School of Music, the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and Rutgers University. Third Coast Percussion performs exclusively with Pearl/Adams Musical Instruments, Zildjian Cymbals, Remo Drumheads, and Vic Firth sticks and mallets.

Tonight's concert is co-presented by Britt Music & Arts Festival which in addition to tonight's concert, sponsored Third Coast’s appearance in Ashland schools as part of Britt’s expanded efforts to bring musicians into schools in Jackson and Josephine Counties. Throughout this academic year, Britt is bring-ing soloists and ensembles to several local schools throughout Medford, Ash-land, Jacksonville, Central Point, Gold Hill and Wolf Creek. All school visits are provided at no cost to the schools. For more information on any of these resi-dencies, visit brittfest.org/residencies, or contact Kay Hilton at the Britt office at 541-690-3852.

Inspired by its intimate and scenic hillside venue, Britt Music & Arts Festi-val provides diverse live performances, an incomparable classical festival and dynamic education programs that create a sense of discovery and community. Since its grassroots beginnings in 1963, the non-profit organization has grown from a two-week chamber music festival to a summer-long series of concerts in a variety of genres, including a three-week Classical Festival, and year-round education and engagement programs. For more information, visit www.brittfest.org.

Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

The compositions of Third Coast Percussion member David Skidmore are performed regularly in concert halls and universities across the country. His Unknown Kind was premiered in Carnegie Hall in 2007, and his multi-movement work Common Patterns in Uncommon Time was commissioned in 2011 for the 100th anniversary of Taliesin, site of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

Trying is a 3-movement work that explores layering of multiple rhythmic cycles. The work draws inspiration from the driving but metrically ambiguous heavy metal of Swedish band Meshuggah and the kaleidoscopic percussion writing of composer Alejandro Viñao, but lives in a more transparent sound world, where each repeating voice floats against the others in its own metric cycle.

While many composers of the 20th century were crafting music driven by complex theoretical and numerical systems, minimalist composer Steve Reich was determined to create music that progressed through clearly audible pro-cesses.

Music for Pieces of Wood is a study in economy of means, both in terms of physical and musical materials. Reich specifies an exact pitch for each of the pieces of wood that are the only instruments in this work, and the three sections of the piece are each comprised of a single rhythm, with each player building up his own version of the pattern before blending into the texture. Many of the rhythms that emerge along the way suggest alternative meters or rhythmic inflections that may change the listener’s perception of the whole.

Tobias Broström is a Swedish percussionist and composer. In addition to his numerous works for percussion, he has written electro-acoustic music, music for film and dance, chamber music and orchestral music. He has held positions as Composer-in-Residence for the Gävle Symphony Orchestra and featured composer for the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and Västerås Sinfonietta.

Twilight was composed in the summer of 2001 when Broström, at age 22, was beginning to shift his professional focus from percussion to composi-tion. Originally written as a duet, it was later re-scored for marimba quar-tet. Chords blend into each other using the natural resonance of the marim-ba, creating a hazy ambiguity evocative of the space between sunset and full night.

Alexandre Lunsqui was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After ten years based in New York City, he is back to Brazil as a Professor of Composition and Theory at the Universidade Estadual Paulista, UNESP. He studied at the University of Campinas (BM), University of Iowa (MA), Columbia University (DMA), and IRCAM (year-long cursus of composition and computer music). His music background includes Brazilian music, jazz and contemporary improvisation. His pieces have been played across North and South America, Europe and Asia

by ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic and International Contempo-rary Ensemble.

The word Shi means “food” in Chinese and this lively trio calls the perform-ers to utilize several objects that might be found in an Asian kitchen as musical instruments, such as bamboo mats, glass bottles, chopsticks, and small metal barbeque grills. Of Shi, the composer says the following, “For me, the world of percussion instruments has been an open door to a vast array of sonic explora-tions. Very often this door leads me to the kitchen or a warehouse store near-by.”

To refer to John Cage (1912-1992) as a composer would be an understate-ment; his ideas and influences on music and art are so far-reaching that he is often also deemed a poet, a philosopher, or, perhaps most fitting and all-encompassing, an artist. A revolutionary thinker who studied composition un-der Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, Cage produced work that centered primarily on the belief that there is no distinction between “sound” and “music.” This belief led Cage to experiment with the timbral possibilities of per-cussion instruments and everyday objects. In doing so, Cage freed himself from traditional, harmonic-centered modes of music theory and foregrounded new possibilities for contemporary percussion music. His early works are some of the first pieces written for percussion ensemble, and they remain staples of the repertoire more than 50 years after they were first imagined.

Third Construction utilizes a wide array of instruments, including tin cans, split pieces of bamboo, a conch shell and the “lion’s roar,” a modified drum that uses friction to create an animal-like groaning sound. Despite very complex rhythms that often displace the listener’s perception of the beat, the piece is in entirely in cut time, and follows a more complex version of the ‘square’ form used in the previous two constructions. In this case, there are 24 sections of 24 measures, and each player’s sections are grouped according to a different scheme (for instance, the first player’s phrases are always 2-8-2-4-5-3, while the fourth player’s are 8-2-4-5-3-2).

BIOGRAPHY

Hailed by The New Yorker as “vibrant” and “superb,” Third Coast Percus-sion explores and expands the extraordinary sonic possibilities of the percus-sion repertoire, delivering exciting performances for audiences of all kinds. Formed in 2005, Third Coast Percussion has developed an international reputa-tion with concerts and recordings of inspiring energy and subtle nuance.

These “hard-grooving” musicians (New York Times) have become known for ground-breaking collaborations across a wide range of disciplines, including concerts and residency projects with engineers at the University of Notre Dame, architects at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, astronomers at the Adler Planetarium, and more. The ensemble has also designed free iPh-one and iPad apps that allow audience members to create their own musical performances and take a deeper look at the music performed by Third

Coast Percussion.

Third Coast Percussion is the Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Notre Dame's DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, a position they assumed in